This just in from the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Statement of Commissioner Joseph Martens: DEC has been reviewing approximately 80,000 comments submitted concerning the Department’s review of high volume hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracking). While a wide variety of issues are addressed by the comments, many focus on the potential public health impacts of high volume...

More than seven out of 10 New York state voters (72 percent) think that Governor Cuomo should “wait for all the necessary health and environmental studies to be completed first before opening the state to fracking,” according to a major new Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey. Significantly, a closer look at voters in the state’s...

Kingston is located just beyond the eastern edge of the underlying Marcellus Shale. This gift of geography would seem to exempt Kingstonians from the environmental woes associated with high-volume natural gas hydraulic fracturing, which may begin in the gas-rich shale formation next year with the lifting of the state’s temporary moratorium. Yet the city potentially...

Most things in life are bitter or sweet, this and that, pro and con. Politics is mostly black and white. Even ceremonial occasions, like the grand opening of the Maurice Hinchey Catskill Interpretative Center at Mount Tremper last week, can produce mixed emotions. There was of course, the event itself, long delayed and eagerly awaited....

“I knew I was going into a hostile thing,” Ulster County Legislature Chairman John Parete said of his scheduled face-off with the Ulster Democratic executive committee at party headquarters on John Street in Kingston last week. Parete emerged the next day from the session bruised but, he said, triumphant. “I didn’t take one step backward,”...

They say money can’t buy you love. Neither, at least in the Hudson Valley, can it buy a Congressional seat, as was demonstrated last year. Recent reports from the Federal Elections Commission show Democrat Sean Eldridge outspent Republican Chris Gibson by better than two-to-one last year, but lost the election by a similar margin. Gibson...

Shortly after dusk on Election Day in 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as was his custom, greeted neighbors and friends from the balcony of his Hyde Park home. “As you know,” he said, “I don’t make predictions about elections. But this I can predict with certainty: The next president of the United States will be from...

Across the country, Tuesday was a bad night for virtually any candidate with a “D” next to their name on the ballot. For Sean Eldridge, the 28-year-old venture capitalist and would-be sitter in New York’s 19th Congressional District seat, it was even worse. After pouring a reported $4 million of his personal fortune into a...

The barnburner campaign I had hoped for in the 103rd Ulster-Dutchess Assembly district, Kevin Cahill versus Kevin Roberts, has been something of a fizzle. It seemed as though all the elements were in place, Cahill as villain, Roberts as accuser. Cahill set the stage last year, said his detractors, by holding up the 1 percent...

Judging the two candidates in terms of which one would do the best job for, and funnel the most federal support to, the 19th Congressional District in general and Ulster and Kingston in particular, we endorse the re-election of Chris Gibson. In his first term representing Ulster County in a Congress with a near-abysmal record...

Raucous groups of partisans emitted whoops, yells and hisses at the first public face-off between Congressional candidates Chris Gibson and Sean Eldridge at overheated Miller Middle School in Lake Katrine the evening of Monday, Oct. 6. The rowdies numbered only about a third of the more than 600 in attendance. The majority came to look,...

Onstage before a partisan-packed standing-room-only crowd, Republican Congressman Chris Gibson and challenger Sean Eldridge traded some of the fiercest barbs yet in a race that has already seen allegations of shameless carpet-bagging and selling out to corporations. The debate, the second of four forums scheduled this month, was held Monday evening at Miller Middle School...